The Novigrad Sea was described by the English architect and Oxford professor Thomas Graham Jackson in his travelogue Dalmatia the Quarnero and Istria... published in 1887.

From the beginning of the 16th century, the Novigrad Sea was shown on different maps. The oldest known representation is the one on the map of the Zadar and Šibenik region printed by Matteo Pagano in Venice at the end of the 1530s.